HAIM

finally got to listen to this. is fun and good

i had intentionally not listened to 'falling' until now so i'd have more new stuff to enjoy w/ the full album, and that song is insane

This is probably my favorite album of the year. That said, as mentioned above, "The Wire" is perilously close to Amy Grant's "Every Heartbeat" and I wonder what my teenage self would have thought of it.

Also, yeah, "Falling" is the best song I've heard all year.

my favorite production on a track since i don't know when but a while ago

Love the little electro stabs on "Days Are Gone".

i'm taking my time working through the album but this stuff is just on another level

it isn't too polished?

Ariel Rechtshaid's production trajectory has gone parabolic, from Cass McCombs and Glasser to Usher ("Climax"), Charlie XCX, Vampire Weekend, and Haim in a couple of years.

i am of the opinion that there's no such thing as 'too polished'. i don't think 'polished' and 'sterile' are part of the same spectrum and this is the former but not the latter.

Not even that polished, the way the drums rudely burst in at the beginning and the end of Forever.

FWIW I really hate the post-Soft Bulletin trend of foregrounding drums like that.

I remember you recoiling from Diane Young for the same reason. I like 'em.

It works on Diane Young in the context of the rest of the album, usually it just makes a band sound cackhanded.

I love this album but struggle a bit with the more pastichey tracks. On the singles I hear influences but If I Could Change My Mind sounds too much like recreation, great tune notwithstanding.

gotta agree with the general meh upthread - this sound is already over-saturated, dunno how anyone can even hear anything of worth in it.

yay another indie band who can use reverb and everyone says sounds like fleetwood mac, i mean srsly we've had this as a blindly accepted "good thing" for what, seven years? ten years?

Not sure who has revived this specific sound before though?

"Sounds like Fleetwood Mac" can mean a lot of things.

yeah it seems to be used pretty lazily as a way of endorsing a band. or a broader sound.

all the lissvik-associated bands for starters have revived it (el perro del mar, there was another last year) - with varying degrees of success. there've been other inconsequential things i've listened to and forgotten about, i mean, do you really hear this and think "yes, finally someone is making this sound"?

fair enough if so. i mean parts of this sound like the 80s or whatever and parts sound like hot chip or something, there's a general digital indie pop thing which evokes the xx too.

"Sounds like Fleetwood Mac" is pretty reductive. Clearly influenced by Fleetwood Mac and a ton of other stuff, yes. Bottom line is they consistently write better songs than any of the other bands you're referring to - only Chairlift come close imo and, as noted upthread, they're on an artier tip.

http://www.collapseboard.com/reviews/albums-reviews/haim-days-are-gone-columbia/

However, if you’re someone over the age of 23 who professes to care about music and you buy this album, you should be ashamed of yourself. Grow the fuck up. Remaining a child all your life is nothing to be proud of.

I'll see how it settles in, I don't really feel like the songs are better, I reckon the El Perro Del Mar record is better than this, but I may just be incapable of liking a record I feel like I'll hear at every social occasion ever for god... three to four weeks at least.

xpost

This is nothing like El Perro Del Mar though.

I love that El Perro Del Mar record but it's going for a very different atmosphere, more hazy, more horizontal, kind of Balearic Julee Cruise vibe. There are similarities in the source material but the treatment is completely different to any Lissvik produced project really, the Haim album is a straight-up pop record.

Yeah these are proper, sturdy, radio-friendly pop songs, not the kind of fuzzy platonic-ideal pop that the Balearic crew produce.

i mean the 2009 epdm btw, more than pale fire.

I just feel like the rhythmic approach is very different to say Lissvik productions. I described it elsewhere as "all these nervous, stuttery 1987 grooves slowly unfurling and building momentum like a colt learning how to run for the first time."

The difference is that there is not really much if any disco (or synth-pop) in Haim's arrangements.

It's definitely the XX debut or Bloom of 2013, I'll grant you that.

Yeah 'Love Is Not Pop' was the EPDM I was thinking of, as far as I can remember it's the only one I've heard.

The Collapseboard review is astonishingly, bar-raisingly bad.

Rockist agonistes

I'll leave you to repost it on worst music writing ever thread then

Scott Creney lives in Athens, Georgia. He is the author of Dear Al-Qaeda: Letters to the World’s Most Notorious Terror Organization and countless others

Not even that polished, the way the drums rudely burst in at the beginning and the end of Forever.

FWIW I really hate the post-Soft Bulletin trend of foregrounding drums like that.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, October 2, 2013 5:52 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

back when they only had an EP or so out, i always got 'forever' and 'don't save me' confused because they intro'd both songs with foregrounded drums

When people compare bands to Fleetwood Mac, nine out of ten times they mean Fleetwood Mac's drum sounds.

You think that's the case here?

Well, I think people are certainly thinking of the production quality of Tango in the Night - which is very arranged and percussion heavy - more than the songwriting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYrDfpirDCQ

Nope, no percussion in that one!

what? It's all over the place!

That was a very dry joke. Dry as the drum sound.

I don't know what I expected this album to be but it's very pleasant

"Honey & I" feels like it's about 500 years long, though

This album isn't great bc it sounds like Tango in the night or whatever (which I haven't heard, along with a lot of the other reference points people are dropping -- I couldn't name you a Wison Phillips song, Shania? I know "Man I Feel Like a Woman") although it's a nice sound, it's great because its by leagues the catchiest set of songs I've heard this year. I think I said earlier I've barely gone hours since I first heard it without one of these songs (and every single one of them at some point) popping into my head.

Yeah, the complaints of filler I've read are dumbfounding. Every track on this album is tight as fuck.

yeah this album has hooks for days

I love Tango in the Night but it's patchier than this.

They're both patchy.

btw I don't think this particularly sounds like Tango. I posted "Caroline" because I thought it must be what people had in mind when comparing the two albums.

I'm pretty sure the Shania comparisons come solely from The Wire.

I don't agree with this album being patchy at all.

Really the only thing stopping this from being a lock for my AOTY is that Chance writes brilliant lyrics and they don't.

I'm eh on "Falling" and one of the ballads at the end. It's still one of the year's best.

"Let Me Go" rules pretty hard

I didn't really get "Falling" til I heard it on the album but now I always want to listen to it. And then I listen to the rest of the album.